Wednesday Scrambler: Finals Week

Ah, finals week. The time of the year all sports stop so the student-athletes in the Hawkeye athletic department are able to do the whole school thing and stop providing all of us distractions from life. How selfish!

There’s been good in the fall semester and there’s been bad. We’ve been through an up and down football season, mixed results in the Hawkeye non-revenue sports, a good start to wrestling, and a basketball team that’s downed Iowa State and made Monte Morris upset.

What a fall and half of winter season it’s been.

In that spirit, we here at The Pants are giving you a quick final in Iowa athletics this season. It’s a five-question, cumulative exam, with answers at the bottom of this post. You can cheat and be a narc if you’d like, but we prefer you didn’t.

1. Name the current Rivals ranking of the 2017 Iowa football recruiting class. Bonus points if you can name the high-water mark before like, everyone, de-committed.
2. Name the three statistical categories Kirk Ferentz and his squad finished atop the Big Ten in 2016.
3. Speaking from a purely statistical point of view, did ex-linebacker coach Jim Reid or the Hawkeye defense win the breakup? I.E., was Boston College’s defense better than Iowa’s?
4. Peter Jok is fifth in Division I basketball in scoring at 23.8 PPG this season. Name two of the four players ahead of him.
5. Hawkeye wrestling’s last official regular-season dual loss came at the hands of ________ in ______.

It may or may not have flown under the radar, but Ron Coluzzi being named a permanent team captain for the Hawkeyes is an awesome move by the Iowa coaching staff and roster. We saw time and again how valuable he was to the Hawkeyes in 2016.

The dude more or less won the Michigan game, was an awesome teammate by all accounts, and was a media darling on a team not so full of media darlings. It’s too bad we only got one season of the punter, but we might get four years of his long-snapping brother.

For the record, you’re not alone in thinking it’s strange Kirk Ferentz and company name permanent team captains after the season.

Jim Harbaugh managed to call other Big Ten coaches enemies and jive turkeys in the same breath on Wednesday. Obligatory.

Zombie Burger is now open for business downtown Iowa City, and opened in Coralville for the grown ups on Black Friday. I hear Jimmy Jack’s put a location in the Old Cap Mall too?!

Looks like we all graduated too early.

Not sure how this slipped by last week, but Twitter lets users create their own Moments these days. Think this eliminates Storify from the curriculum, fellow J-school grads?

As mentioned above, it’s a downtime in the sports calendar, ladies and gents. There isn’t much happening in not only Hawkeye athletics, or really, the sports world in general. The NFL playoff picture is happening, but we all know it’s going to be the Patriots against Seattle or Dallas in the Super Bowl, so that’s that. Baseball’s hot stove is mildly warm, basketball and hockey have yet to ramp up.

Bowl season is almost upon us, however, apparently the Hawkeyes and Gators in the Outback Bowl isn’t watchable or something. To ignore the gap in the calendar, here’s some reading on the Denver Airport Conspiracy theory, which I spent multiple hours learning about Sunday.

Carry on.

THE ANSWERS

1. 50. After being ranked as high as 25 by the site, everything went down the drain after Benjamin, Calloway, and Company re-opened their recruitment.
2. 4th down conversions — 68.75 percent. Red zone percentage — 92.31 percent. Fumbles lost — 2.
3. In total defense, Boston College, who’s 310.6 yards per game ranked eighth nationally — Iowa’s 352.8 was good for 24th. In scoring defense, it was 10th-ranked Iowa at 17.9. BC finished 44th with 24.6 points allowed per contest. You decide, who won the divorce?
4. Central Michigan’s Marcus Keene, 30.8ppg. Valpo’s Alex Peters, 25.3ppg. Davidson’s Jack Gibbs, 24.3ppg. Campbell’s Chris Clemons, 24ppg.
5. Minnesota, Jan. 25, 2014. The Hawkeyes have lost twice in the National Duals since then, however.